236 Diet and Health
and have derived their food supplies from the agency stores. In addition to muscle cuts
of meat they have, therefore, taken large amounts of milled cereal products, syrup,
molasses, sugar and canned foods, such as peas, corn and tomatoes. In other words, they
have come to subsist essentially upon a milled cereal, sugar, tuber and meat diet. On
such a regimen their teeth have rapidly become inferior and badly decayed. They suffer
much from rheumatism and other troubles which result from local infections. Faulty
dietary habits are in great measure to be incriminated for their susceptibility to tubercu-
losis.
Other classes of Indians, who have become successful farmers, have not deterio-
rated as a result of contact with civilization, except in so far as they have suffered from
alcohol and venereal infections. The non-citizen Indian has suffered, not because of
contact with civilization, but because he has been forced into dietary habits which are
faulty. (McCollum and Simmonds.)In the days of their prime these people subsisted mainly on the wild game of virgin
forest and prairie, regions in which the law of return operated fully.
For the last example I go back to the continent of Asia, to the people of rural
China. Their diet is nearer to that of the Hunza than to any of the other examples
we have looked at. Fruit, vegetables and sprouted grain are staples of both diets,
but unlike the Hunza the principal cereal of the Chinese is rice, not wheat, and
they also eat meat, birds, fish and eggs. They are in addition, as is well known,
great tea drinkers. In common with the other four groups they eat the whole car-
cass and the whole grain or vegetable. In the matter of preparation they resemble
the Hunza in that everything is eaten together. But are we justified in claiming that
they are healthy?
Sooner or later all advocates of organic farming cite the Chinese, going so far
as to call them the fathers of good husbandry. Their authority for doing so is
almost always Professor King’s famous book, Farmers of Forty Centuries. The critics
of the ‘organic school’, however, challenge the accuracy of King’s report. They say
that he was only in the country for a few weeks, that the Chinese people as a whole
have an abnormally high death rate, and that the whole country is riddled with
disease, most of which is sewage borne because the peasants fail to compost their
human wastes.
I have made great efforts to check these two opposing views. The truth seems
to lie in the statement from Lord Northbourne’s Look to the Land, that ‘China
presents remarkable contrasts between the best and the worst’. It is a vast country.
Undoubtedly conditions are very bad indeed in some areas, particularly in the
overcrowded cities, both as regards health and sewage disposal. But there seems
equally little doubt that in certain rural areas composting of a very high order,
amounting to a fine art, has been practised for centuries. But, however the overall
picture should be painted, one fact seems indisputable, namely, that through the
operation of the closed cycle (i.e. without the importation of chemical fertilizers)
the soil of China has – despite periodic floods and famines – supported a huge
population and a high culture for a period of 4000 years. For this reason, I feel